Lance Willett Helps Beginners Navigate WordPress Theme Landscape

Fresh from WordCamp Phoenix 2012, Lance Willett who works for Automattic and is part of the theme wrangler team gave a great presentation for beginners on how to navigate the vast landscape that is WordPress themes. He covers the gamut such as where to look for themes, commercial themes, things to consider before using the theme on your site, etc. This presentation is truly for the beginner as it has nothing to do with coding. Nice job Lance.

Who is Jeff Chandler

Jeff Chandler is a WordPress guy in the buckeye state. Contributing writer for WPTavern. Have been writing about WordPress since 2007. Host of the WordPress Weekly Podcast.

8 Comments

Thanks Jeffro. I’d like to see more conversations happen in the community about finding and using themes—not just about building or selling them.

I received many great questions from the attendees after my session, and continued the conversation throughout the rest of the WordCamp. I hope it helped people get a better handle on things; it can be a wild and crazy landscape.

Hello Lance. I have had my blog over at WordPress.com and now have it hosted. I guess it is now at .org, anyway, just wondering if you know how to navigate and find other peoples tags and be able to follow other people sites. LIke yours for instance, i do not know how to mark it and follow your other writings? Help please.
~Franny

lance, are these plug ins that I need to add? What about getting traffic to my site? Over at wp.com, they have the Freshly Pressed page and you can search tags that people are using. Do you know how it works and what i need to do in wp.org
Thanks ~Fran

Where do you start trying to help some people who are so pathetically ignorant (and I don’t mean that in a bad way), that their lack of knowledge includes not only a lack of any real understanding of the technical issues, but also the fact that they are obviously trying to communicate in a second or third language?

This is the Internuts dilemma which, it seems, is not going to be resolved by spoon feeding a simple answer. Apparently, or at least I think I observe, this is the empirical solution at work daily; best to ignore them, so their thirst for knowledge motivates them to study further and learn for themselves, in the depth necessary to solve their problem, rather than just help them with easy answers to their current problems.

Am I right or am I left?

But when helpful advice like RTFM and “Google is your friend” go un-headed, what should be our collective responsibility to them? Any or none?

Sorry Terence if you think that i am pathetically ignorant. I am new at this and at least I am trying to find answers. I have googled and googled looking for answers, to no avail. Not everyone does this type of work for a living and some of us are trying to learn what this world is coming to in the technilogical age. I just thought this site was to help with questions. :-( Sorry for any inconvience or stress that this may have caused you. It was NOT my intention at all. I will continue my search elsewhere.